Quick Fixes (Kim's Sick)

I've been sick with a bad cold lately, so I haven't been cooking much that's interesting. In fact, I practically slept through the last four days. Then when I came into work today, a coworker made a mug of her famous ginger tea for me. The tea's cloudy with what I think must be some form of ginger has some kind of citrus, but it's sweet, with the strongest ginger flavor that clears you right up. If I can get the recipe from her I'll put it up here.

I was stunned when I came to my site and discovered I'm going on a week without writing anything. I really have been very lazy about cooking lately. Here are a couple of things I did make that didn't seem to suffer too much from the shortcuts I took. First there was a quick chicken parm from Martha Stewart's new Everyday Food magazine. I'm finding that I turn to that magazine a lot when it's dinnertime; the recipes are all written so concisely and they're in this cute little booklet so they tend to come across as very accessible. Whether they're good is sort of another matter, but I did like the chicken (Todd and I both gave a curried shrimp recipe the thumbs down, though). We bought cutlets, so it was simply a matter of dredging them in beaten egg then bread crumbs (purchased, yes, so sorry--I was sick) seasoned with a lot of freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Panfried for a couple minutes on each side, then slid into a pan with a layer of marinara on the bottom. Topped with fresh mozzarella and put them under the broiler for just shy of 5 minutes. Ate the leftovers today on a roll.

Also had a berry crumble that was just a bag of frozen mixed berries (unsweetened from Trader Joe's) with a crumb topping of oats, brown sugar, walnuts, butter and flour. Todd put his superb skills to use cutting the butter into the mixture (his breakfast specialty is lighter-than-air drop biscuits). Then we spooned the hot berries over vanilla ice cream. I was elated (it may have been the cold medicine, but the crumble was good, too).